On June 25, in the history-rich rooms of the National Library of Naples, the Vesuvius Challenge team announced the first end-to-end complete virtual unwrapping and reading of a carbonized scroll from Herculaneum, PHerc. 1667 (Scroll 4).
But this was not the only announcement of the day! The research team also unveiled a banner with an end-to-end virtual unwrapping of the bottom 70% of PHerc. 172 (Scroll 5) previously announced on this Substack.
The title and attribution of PHerc. 139 were also identified, revealing the artifact to be Philodemus’s “On Gods, Book 8”.
And the surprises did not end there!
The night before the event, the team managed to unwrap approximately 140 columns of text from PHerc. Paris 4 (Scroll 1), which was rescanned on beamline BM18 at ESRF at higher resolution (2.4 μm).
The data are available on our redesigned website, for everyone to read!
These astounding results mark the beginning of a new age in Herculaneum papyrology. One full scroll has been read, and we hope the others will follow swiftly!
Yet the methods behind these technical breakthroughs still require humans in the loop. Full automation is required to read the collection within a reasonable timeframe, and legibility could improve. Long story short: there are still open problems to be solved, and mysteries to uncover.
To that end, Vesuvius Challenge co-founder, instigator and main sponsor Nat Friedman announced a new $1M Grand Prize, with a deadline of June 25, 2027.
Prizes will be awarded to the team or teams that fully unroll and make readable another complete scroll from the eligible set while using no more than eight hours of human input.
The Grand Prize will be the biggest prize, in a revamped pool of open prizes amounting to $2M+ !
The pool also includes 10 prizes for teams that are first to find letters in scrolls from the eligible set. In addition, a guaranteed $20,000 will be awarded every month to the best open-source submission that makes the collection easier to read.
Find here details about terms and conditions.
Alongside these major announcements, the community continued to contribute! We are happy to announce the winners of June progress prizes:
$2,000 to Paulo Sergio Camillo, for introducing more CT scan artifact-inspired augmentations to the training pipeline of Machine Learning 3D segmentation models, and for making ScrollFiesta faster and more computationally efficient.
$1,000 to Joseph Balmaceda, for developing a tool that converts skeleton-annotated fibers from NML into standard, dependency-light formats—CSV, JSON, and SWC—and analyzes their length, branching, and orientation
Spread the word! The Vesuvius Challenge is in full swing.
Join us—and together, let’s claim the ultimate victory.
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